All Messages 2018

27 November 2018

Sebastian’s racing year came to an end today as he completed 68 laps of the Abu Dhabi track, with a best time of 1min36.812, which came courtesy of a fresh set of 2018-spec Hypersoft tyres.“The purpose of this test is primarily to get a first feeling of the new tyres, with the impressions of the last weekend of racing still fresh in our minds,which gave us the possibility to compare. Unfortunately, today we lost some track time to repair work, but overall I think there were no major surprises as these tyres seem to work and to be fairly similar to the ones we used this season. Now we’ll see how the new regulations for 2019 affect the speed of all cars and how they work in combination with the tyres, also depending on the compound choices at the various tracks”.Tomorrow, for the second and last day of tyre testing, Charles Leclerc will take over from Seb with a similar programme.

25 November 2018

I think today’s race sums up the year pretty well: a few ups and downs and in the end just being close, but not close enough. Today, I really tried to hang on as long as I could, but it was tough being behind Valtteri. I believe I was a little bit quicker, but it was very difficult to get close, especially in the last sector, until he had some issues and I managed to get past. We were strong in the straights and we had speed, but we were struggling in the last sector to keep up, especially in the last two corners. At one point, I had hopes of winning the race, so I was pushing as hard as I could, but in the end it was not enough. It has been a very intense year and I think we have to look at ourselves, as there are many things that we can do better and the potential this team has is still huge.

24 November 2018

I think that today we correctly worked out the direction to take in terms of tyre strategy and we were able to follow the trend. Yesterday we had tried everything, but the Hypersoft tyres didn’t last for long, so we were quite confident they weren’t the tyres we wanted to start the race on. Today I knew in my second run I had some lap time to gain and I wanted to start on the Ultrasofts, so that’s why I was happy to take the risk and do my second run in Q2 on the same compound. In general, I’ve been happy with our session. For tomorrow I would have liked to start from the front row, but our main rivals probably had saved some performance cushion for the last run in Q3. As I told the guys in the garage, in the race we will fight as much as we can; then anything might happen. Today we had good speed on the straights, but I guess we were lacking a little bit of downforce in the last sector, so let’s see what we can do. For sure, it is going to be a long race.

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